Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment is a PC game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft in 1994, it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates; however, many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years to come. Blizzard also has a reputation for taking fierce legal action against anyone who reverse engineers their software, copies their game concepts, or publishes third-party server software that is compatible with all of their games.

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Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under USD$10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft.

Blizzard has changed hands several times since then; Davidson was acquired by a timeshare company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant Software, in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, including Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the VU Games group of Vivendi Universal.

Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in December 1996 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo.

On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, which has grown to become one of the most popular MMORPGs in history.

On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape, a console game maker, which is now Blizzard Console, currently working on Starcraft: Ghost, but in March 2006 (last mentioned on the website on March 30, 2006) they announced that Starcraft: Ghost was on indefinite hold.

On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.

A few months after the closure of Blizzard North, Bill Roper, Erich Schaefer and his brother Max Schaefer co-founded Flagship Studios which developed Mythos (on July 19, 2008 it was announced that due to continuing financial hardships at Flagship Studios, Mythos would be going on hiatus) and Hellgate London released in the fall of 2007.

Blizzard is currently a division of Activision Blizzard, Inc. as a result of a merger that was announced on December 7, 2007. The merger was completed on July 9, 2008.[1]

After the release of World of Warcraft, Blizzard split its development staff into numerically designated teams (e.g. the development team for Diablo III is Team 3. "Strike teams" also exist—not attached to any particular project, but exist to give feedback to the game-specific teams. A "design council" also exists, a gathering of all of the game directors and lead designers throughout the company.[2] The existence of strike teams dates back to the development of Diablo II.[3] As of August 2017, most of Blizzard's development is focused on supporting its existing IPs, but has a "pipleline" of new IPs.[4]